The corpus is composed of more than 1 billion words from 220,225 texts, including 20 million words from each of the years 1990 through 2017. The most recent update was made in December 2017. The corpus is used by approximately tens of thousands of people each month, which may make it the most widely used "structured" corpus currently available. For each year, the corpus is evenly divided between the following five genres: spoken, fiction, popular magazines, newspapers, and academic journals. The texts come from a variety of sources:
Spoken: Transcripts of unscripted conversation from nearly 150 different TV and radio programs.
Fiction: Short stories and plays, first chapters of books 1990–present, and movie scripts.
Popular magazines: Nearly 100 different magazines, from a range of domains such as news, health, home and gardening, women's, financial, religion, and sports.
Newspapers: Ten newspapers from across the US, with text from different sections of the newspapers, such as local news, opinion, sports, and the financial section.
The corpus is free to search through its web interface, with a limit on the number of queries per day, and less-restricted access is available at cost. The full corpus texts are available for a further fee.
Queries
The interface is the same as the BYU-BNC interface for the 100 million word British National Corpus, the 100 million word TIME Magazine corpus, and the 400 million word Corpus of *Historical* American English, 1810s–2000s
Queries by word, phrase, alternates, substring, part of speech, lemma, synonyms, and customized lists
The corpus is tagged by CLAWS, the same part of speech tagger that was used for the BNC and the TIME corpus
Chart listings and table listings
Full collocates searching
Re-sortable concordances, showing the most common words/strings to the left and right of the searched word
Comparisons between genres or time periods
One-step comparisons of collocates of related words, to study semantic or cultural differences between words
Users can include semantic information from a 60,000 entry thesaurus directly as part of the query syntax
Users can also create their own 'customized' word lists, and then re-use these as part of subsequent queries
Note that the corpus is available only through the web interface, due to copyright restrictions.
Related
The corpus of contains about 1.9 billion words of text from twenty different countries. This makes it about 100 times as large as other corpora like the International Corpus of English, and it allows for many types of searches that would not be possible otherwise. In addition to this online interface, you can also download full-text data from the corpus. it is unique in the way that it allows you to carry out comparisons between different varieties of English. GloWbE is related to the many other corpora of English.
